Grave Yd, Templenoe, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
At this small graveyard in Templenoe, County Tipperary, the dead have been buried directly through the walls of the church they once attended.
The eastern end of an older church building has been backfilled over time, and eighteenth and nineteenth-century graves cut right into it, collapsing the boundary between sacred architecture and burial ground in a way that feels less like neglect and more like continuity.
The graveyard itself is modest, roughly square, measuring about 19 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west, enclosed by a stone wall. The church, rather than standing separately, has been incorporated into the western wall of the enclosure, making it structurally part of the boundary rather than a freestanding building. Among the graves that press against and into the eastern end of that church is one bearing the oldest inscribed headstone on the site, that of a Bourke, dated 1731. A short distance away, approximately 35 metres to the north-north-east, sits a bullaun stone. These are boulders or bedrock surfaces with one or more rounded hollows ground into them, often associated with early ecclesiastical sites, where the depressions were used for grinding or, in later folk tradition, for healing and votive practices. Their presence near a church site of this kind is not unusual in Ireland, but it anchors the place within a much older layer of activity than the eighteenth-century headstones alone would suggest.